Retiring the Command Prompt and Windows PowerShell

00:00 Here we are on the Windows system, and with me is the Real Python Windows guy, Ian. Hi, Philipp. Pleasure to be here as the Real Python Windows guy. Let’s jump right in and start with showing how to find the terminal on Windows.

00:15 For other operating systems, on macOS and Linux, it’s there already, and I always thought that Windows also had something like a terminal, but maybe you can show me what’s there usually on a Windows system and how to get a terminal on Windows. Yes.

00:32 A lot of material on the Internet is very focused towards Unix-based systems, and it can be hard to find some Windows instructions. So in terms of the terminal, there is a terminal in Windows, though it’s not called the terminal.

00:48 And the classic terminal back from the days when there was MS-DOS is the Command Prompt, which is actually sort of a copy of MS-DOS so that all the scripts that people wrote in MS-DOS could work on Windows.

01:02 So if I go to the Start menu and just type in Command Prompt, you’ll see the app come up here,

01:09 and this is what you will be presented with roughly. And I have something else installed, so I’ve got a couple extra lines coming up, but it’s this. It’s a black screen. You can make that a bit bigger.

01:22 And yeah, this is a terminal or a command prompt or a command line. The terminology is quite fluid here. Okay. And when you were saying you were making it a bit bigger, you were pressing, like, Control + to increase the font size.

01:37 Control + doesn’t seem to work. It’s actually Control, and I moved the mouse wheel up and down. Okay.

01:46 But I think if you right-click … no, I’m not sure. But anyway, you’ll come to see that I don’t really recommend this application if you’re getting started with this stuff. So in any font size, it’s not ideal. Yes.

02:00 Really because it’s old, and it’s trying to emulate an even older system, but it’s just stuck around for so long because so many people use Windows, and so many people still have these scripts from years ago that to just delete it from the system would cause havoc. Okay.

02:18 So the next one you might find, or you might have seen, is Windows PowerShell, which is also an app, which starts up something like this. And it’s actually the same program as the Windows Command Prompt in the sense that it has the same controls—like I press Control and the mouse wheel up to resize this—but it’s a different shell. So it’s a different program in the back, but the actual window itself is the same program.

02:44 I don’t want to get into too much detail about that because that gets quite complicated quite quickly. But this is Windows PowerShell, which is a newer shell to replace the Command Prompt that Windows came up with. And this is good, and if you want to use this, you’ll see PowerShell on Real Python tutorials and you can use this, although even this is a bit old.